...not afraid of snakes...

Saturday, August 06, 2016

I've been watching a lot of book videos on YouTube recently, with a growing desire to contribute to the conversation. At the same time I've wondered if making videos might be an answer to those times when writing a longish blog review is beyond my powers. Somehow a couple of thousand words seems like a lot more effort than talking to myself for 10 minutes. Anyway, I decided to give it a go and do a 'tag' video by way of introduction, without any special equipment or editing or, well, forethought really. It's taken me almost a week to work out how to upload it, but here it is finally, live and online.

Forgive the roughness of it, especially all the hand waving and clapping and hair fidgeting - I need to learn to sit still - and also the poor quality of the video. I made it on my ancient old iPad.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped.

Annie Proulx's new novel is about devastation, both cultural and environmental. Over the course of 700 intensively researched pages and 300 years it charts the story of the colonization of North America, and the landscapes and ways of life it destroyed, from the perspectives of two very different immigrant families. It is huge and densely peopled, boasting moments of tender brilliance that are ultimately, sadly, overwhelmed by the repetitive drone of facts and names, and the glacial drift of time.

Charles Duquet and Rene Sel arrive in New France in 1693, indentured labourers bound to serve the eccentric Seignuer Trépagny for a term of three years. At the end of their indenture they may claim their own plot of land from the thick, endless forest around them, starting a new life away from the poverty of the Old World. Until then they must clear the forest, cutting down trees in order to plant crops and civilise the land. It is back-breaking, demoralising work - there are so many trees; endless numbers of them - in a hostile climate and far from home. Apart from the seigneur the only other human faces belong to Trépagny's native Mi'kmaq 'wife' Mari and her children. Living at close quarters but set apart, they occupy two worlds moving back and forth between their tribal loyalties and the promise of western riches.

Duquet and Sel are vastly different. Duquet is grasping, ambitious and unscrupulous to a fault, while Sel is gentle-hearted, honest, a rough man but good. While the former soon absconds from Trepagny's camp, the latter stays. Eventually he marries Mari, fathers children with her and lives out his life on a patch of land that he (and later his sons) have cleared with their own hands. He starts a dynasty of Sels, half Mi'kmaq, half French, who are bound to the forest in a myriad of ways, as surely as Rene himself was indentured. Duquet meanwhile rises to dizzy heights; making a fortune in commercial logging he reinvents himself as Charles Duke, a merchant of great fame. He marries well, an Old World wife with excellent connections, and builds a business that will, in time, claim swathes of forest from New England to New Zealand.

Barkskins' cast expands exponentially from generation to generation, as Sels and Dukes are born, adopted, married, lost, found and finally die. The confusion of brothers and sisters, of uncles and cousins, of third wives and adopted sons is boggling. With each new iteration of the dynasties it becomes harder and harder to recall their bloodlines, to trace their descent and to bond with a constantly renewing field of personalities. The backdrop however is constant: the awe-inspiring expanse of hardwood forest that provides both their livelihoods - the Sels as lowly loggers; the Dukes as kings (and queens) of the timber industry - and which is slowly being consumed by greed and by ignorance.

There is much in the book to praise, in particular some vignettes that stand out in the long reading of it. For example, Charles Duquet's ridiculous almost endearing pride in the purchase of a grandiose wig in Paris; already several years out of fashion he insists on a style that represents success, wealth and dignity in his childhood memories. Several generations later the wig is rediscovered in an attic by two small boys who, terrified by such a monstrous object, throw it out of a window. The birds carry it off in wisps to make their spring nests. The prose can be lovely too, when describing both the natural world of the forest and man-made cultures. Eighteenth century Amsterdam in a heat wave is "swollen like a cracker in hot milk"; the ships in Boston harbour in the early 1900s are "wooden leviathans, ropestrung like musical instruments, shimmering with raw salt." The themes of the book boom out loud and clear. The Duquets and Sels are complicit in an ecological disaster of extraordinary proportions, a legacy of the abuse of nature for commercial gain that we are now beginning to pay the price for.

Proulx charts the story of the deforestation of her country with a dogged and exhausting relentlessness. She clearly points the finger at the Judeo-Christian (and Western) ideology of dominion. "The newcomers did not care to understand the strange new country beyond taking whatever turned a profit," she writes, "They knew only what they knew. The forest was there for them." The holistic Mi'kmaq beliefs and ways of Sels' descendants are chewed up and spit out by the commercial imperative wholly embraced by the Dukes. It doesn't take a subtle mind to work out where Proulx's sympathies lie. We are treated to page after page of meticulous research, line after line of info-dumping about logging technologies, land surveying, timber processing. The forest is not so much a character of the book as it's moral, with the characters that move through it and over it as mouths to speak the environmental message. It was always going to be a challenge to make such a complex, multi-generational saga work; even more of a challenge when it's burdened with so many facts and freighted with anger. The finished product is, to put it plainly, disappointing. The light moments, the individual characters, are subsumed by the polemical narrative, lost amidst the sound of innumerable axes cutting down innumerable trees.

I finished the book, finally after weeks of determined reading, with a flush of relief. I know there are those who have found their investment in it entirely worthwhile, but for me the determination to make an important point churned together with the workings of the novel, set neither at its best advantage.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

Forgive me lovely people for I have slumped, both in my reading and in my blogging.

It's been over a month since my last confession and I've had to drag myself back to the keyboard like a stroppy teenager.

After a phenomenally good January to May of books, June was a bit of a wasteland. Thankfully July is looking up, but after an absence it's always difficult for me to get back on the horse and write again. The longer the gap the more books there are to be read for review, the more reviews there are to write, the easier it is to retreat into my cave and forget Alexandria until Christmas rolls around. I promised I wouldn't do that this year though, so here I am, doggedly. I'm going to round up all the books I've read during the slumpy time (including some absolute corkers) all in one post and I'm not going to beat myself up about not writing 2000 word reviews on each one. Short, sweet and to the point is the name of the game (let's see how that goes), and then I can start again fresh as a daisy.

A Girl is Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Galley Beggar Press, 2013

Paperback, 227 pages

*My copy bought from a lovely independent bookshop in Whitby.

First up, the book that caused the slump. Yes, I can definitely trace it's origins this time and I'm pointing the finger firmly at A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing by Eimear McBride. If you follow me on Goodreads you may have seen my less than positive response to it. I picked it up finally because I was hosting a read-along in celebration of the Bailey's Prize at my library at the beginning of June. I read it fast over the course of the weekend before the event and it absolutely utterly destroyed me. The bombardment of suffering, abuse, neglect and rape flooded my system, killed off my good reading bacteria and left me desperately sad. I suppose everyone knows by now that this Irish novel is deeply experimental, telling the story of a nameless young girl from childhood to early adulthood in frantic and baffling fragments. It begins when she is still in the womb, against a backdrop of her older brother's near-terminal brain tumour. His miraculous survival and the permanent damage the cancer does both to him and his parents will shadow the narrator for the rest of her life.

It was not the book for me; or rather I was not the right reader for this book. I'm not surprised it caused a literary furor or swept the academy of prizes because I recognise, in my head, that it is a sensational achievement. The style is a babble of consciousness and unconsciouness, addled with snatches of dialogue, internal monologue, overheard noise. It's intriguing. In places I found it very powerful; the set piece of the narrator's grandfather's funeral is a particular example. The visit of a hospice doctor towards the end of the book is another. What I couldn't attune to though was the unrelenting vileness of the human world that the book portrays. The lowest of ebbs of sympathy and love, the absence of joy, the harshness of judgement and, above all, the incessant sexual violence. The latter turned the novel into a bludgeon that beat me bloody. It left me in a cornered state of mental anguish and I found it very difficult to understand or justify its extent. While I admire the determination of any writer to face reality with eyes wide open - to recognise abuse where it is found and catalyse change - it felt to me as though A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing was about damage for it's own sake. I recognise the art in this, but I give myself permission not to hurt myself with it.

So yes, the novel left me troubled, and I didn't read again for over 10 days, barely a word. I went on a four day trip to London on my own, and stayed in a room without a TV, and still didn't crack open a book. I had plenty with me, but was so uninspired. I spent long evenings watching YouTube videos.

First Class Murder by Robin Stevens

Corgi, 2015

Paperback, 336 pages

*My copy borrowed from the library.

It wasn't until the three hour train journey home that I cracked from utter boredom and found some solace in First Class Murder, the third in Robin Steven's middle grade Wells and Wong series. I wrote about the first two books earlier this year here and here. In this installment Hazel and Daisy find themselves aboard the Orient Express for their summer holidays. Following the scandalous murder at Daisy's home earlier in the year, Hazel's father Mr Wong is determined to stop them investigating any more unladylike crimes. But even before the train has pulled out of the station a tantalising new case has presented itself. The female secret agent we met in Arsenic for Tea hops aboard at the last minute, pretending to be the wife of a wealthy copper magnate. What is she doing there? Who is she chasing? Soon enough there is a murder in the first class compartment, and the game is afoot.

I can't resist Daisy and Hazel. Now nearly fourteen and determined to be their own women, they are just the right mix of cunning and guilelessness. I continue to admire the way that Stevens draws out themes about inequality, privilege and trust through their friendship. In this book we glimpse the 1930s through Mr Wong's eyes, and are exposed for the first time to the adult world of racism that Hazel has been somewhat sheltered from thus far. Contemporary events in Europe - the rise of fascism, the persecution of the Jews - also begin to creep in. I'm interested to see how Stevens deals with these issues as the girls grow up in this increasingly troubled climate. Book four is out already and sees a return to the school setting of the first installment, a treat I'll hold on to for another slumpy day.

Then. Then. I read two absolutely astonishing novels, both contenders for my books of 2016. After the slump it was quite astonishing to pick up a book with a sense of excitement. You will have already heard about both multiple times. I feel as though if people aren't talking about The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry it's because they're talking about The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss and vice-a-versa.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Serpent's Tail, 27th May 2016

Hardback, 432 pages

*My copy kindly supplied by the publisher.

I read Perry's debut in April in preparation for The Essex Serpent coming out and I'm so glad I did. It prepared me for the hot-house effect of her writing, the full body immersion of her world-building. This time the conjured world is from the past - the book is set over the course of 1893, from New Year's Day to the following New Year's Eve - and the setting is the Essex marshes. Cora Seaborne is widowed in the opening days of the year, a loss that leaves her giddy with relief and freedom. She is already being courted by her late husband's doctor, Luke Garrett, a surgeon as gifted as he is ill-favoured. She affectionately calls him her Imp and teases him with the possibility of a life together. Her real passion, though, lies elsewhere, embedded in the cliffs and scattered on the beaches of the coast. She is a keen fossil-hunter, and dreams of discoveries like those of Mary Anning. Uprooting her small well-to-do household - her companion Martha and her autistic son Francis - she embarks for the Essex coast, settling eventually in the village of Aldwinter. She finds it in the grip of a legend. The infamous Essex Serpent, last seen in 1669, has resurfaced in the tidal marshes and is menacing the region, taking children and livestock. Local preacher William Ransome is at a loss to convince his parishioners of the Word of God in the face of the mythical beast, arguing for the rationality of one set of beliefs over another. Cora arrives with an alternative explanation: perhaps the serpent is neither a myth or demonic monster, but a prehistoric creature, a living dinosaur. She and Will become unlikely friends, friends of the most extraordinary kind, as science, religion and legend play out in the watery region between the ocean and dry land.

What a finely tuned and delightful book The Essex Serpent is; the rare kind of historical fiction that speaks both to the past and to the present with equal clarity. It may seem very different from After Me Comes the Flood, but underneath its surface there are some clear similarities. It has the same fascination with obsession, with mental disturbances, with repression, with the twisted threads that bind people to one another in love and friendship. Both are tightly structured, using constraint and intertextual reference as a device for exploring emotional extremity. At the same time there are sharp differences, stylistically. After Me is contemporary stoner realism, while The Essex Serpent is a powerhouse of Victorian pastiche, with an impressive repertoire of late nineteenth century mimicry. Also, and this is the most powerful difference, Perry's second novel made me feel strong emotion. While I liked After Me a great deal, it had a reserve to the very end that held me at arms length; The Essex Serpent is tightly buttoned but the deep running currents of love that round out the book are within reach. I'm shelving this one next to Wolf Hall.

The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss

Granta, 7 July 2016

Paperback, 336 pages

*My copy kindly supplied by the publisher.

How do you follow up a book like that? I decided there was no point whatsoever in picking something speculatively; I had to go into something confident that I would love it. Hence The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss. Moss is quickly becoming one of my favourite writers and this is the third of her books I've read this year. (I re-read Bodies of Light and followed it with the sequel Signs for Lost Children back in April.) It's a return to the contemporary for her after a sojourn in the nineteenth century, but a book that echoes and develops the themes of her earlier work. Our narrator is Adam, a stay-at-home dad to two daughters - fifteen year old Miriam; nine year old Rose - and husband to Emma, a desperately overworked GP. In the interstices of the school run, the house work, the preparation of nutritionally balanced meals he is working on a project to create a history app about Coventry Cathedral. It's one of the small uses he makes of his now-distant PhD on the Arts and Crafts movement in the modern revival, along with some teaching at the local university, ordinarily the preserve of 20-something post-docs. Life is comfortable, middle class, ongoing.

Then, for no reason that anyone can discover, Miriam's heart stops. She is at school, it's lunchtime and she has been chatting with friends; when the bell rings she has to dash back to where they were sitting to grab her forgotten mobile phone. During this two minutes alone she collapses and dies. It's a terrifyingly mundane scenario. She is clinically dead for some minutes before a passing teacher manages to revive her. By the time Adam arrives breathless and desperate she is sitting up chatting with the paramedics. Some times, the doctors say, these things just happen. Parents grow accustomed, I imagine, to fleeting worry over the many accidents, illnesses and other evils that could befall their child in the world. But what happens to Miriam is so basic, so fundamental, that Adam's whole life is collapsed in on it. How, the novel asks, is one to reconcile oneself to a world in which the people you love can just stop working like that? If it happened once, it could happen again. It could happen to Rose. It could happen to them both. The book is an exercise in re-telling, of rewriting his life and the lives of his family around this single moment.

Which makes The Tidal Zone sound maudlin and tragic, but it doesn't read like that. Adam's first-person voice is sometimes frantic, but equally often he is wry and sharp, witty about himself, modern parenthood, academia, the National Health Service. He has a dry tone that will be familiar to readers of Night Waking, Moss's last contemporary novel, another book in which a parent struggles to reconcile the realities of parental life with a rarefied academic world. Miriam too is far from the victim of the piece. In spite of her almost-death, she values her self-determination and has a strong sense of her moral and political beliefs, scorning gender and capitalist norms. Like her father, she perceives the irony of protesting against inequality while eating chia smoothies and organic wild salmon.

It also makes it sound like the book is thin on plot, and this is more true. Apart from brief interludes that tell the story of Adam's father's experience of commune life in 1970s America, told to Miriam in her hospital bed, and historical snippets about Coventry Cathedral, The Tidal Zone is one long fret. It isn't so concerned with things happening; it's an exercise in thinking along with someone. It riffs off some common phrases that Adam hears from fellow parents - 'I can't imagine how you're feeling' and 'Some things don't bear thinking about' - and asks us to think about the unthinkable. In so doing it muses on memory, history-making, politics, the state of the NHS, the meaning of academic endeavour, the ties that bind us to others. One of the most fascinating exercises in the unthinkable, Adam considers, is the fictionalisation of the past. He says:

"It is a newer problem that we incline to treat the historical past as a mood board. I don't want to tell endearing little stories about Blighty in the Blitz. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy or comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm."

Putting aside the fact that I heartily agree (and that the heritage 'mood board' is a chapter of my own PhD - more irony), this is an interesting thought for a one-time historical novelist to put into the mouth of a character. It underlines something I had started to suspect, which is that Sarah Moss is a writer who thinks through her fiction, using it as an intellectual territory for exploration, for everything from hyper contemporary political debate (What should we do about the NHS?) to deep dilemmas of the heart (How do we move past the possibility of losing those we love?). I'm excited to see what she does next.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Blimey, that turned into a longer post than I expected. (I don't know why I expected anything else.) I've just looked down at the time on my laptop and realise that a couple of hours have drifted by, and my stomach is rumbling for good reason. There are a couple of books that I didn't get to and will have to wait till next time. Amongst them is Annie Proulx's Barkskins. Have you noticed how I keep promising to talk about that and then failing to? Possibly a spoiler for how I felt about it.

Until then, happy reading all. Let me know what you thought of any of the books in this round-up!

Sunday, June 12, 2016

At nineteen Katherine North is the oldest Phenomenaut at Shencorp, the world's leading Consciousness Projection provider. Recruited at the tender age of twelve she has spent much of the last seven years hooked up to life support in a lab while her mind inhabits the bodies of other animals. In that time she has contributed enormously to scientific research on endangered species - her specialism - bringing back data and the lived experience of being an animal into the human world. She is paired with Buckley, a retired Phenomenaut himself - considered too old to jump at 25 - who monitors her out in the field and tethers her back to her Original Body. During long jobs his is the only voice she hears for weeks at a time, reminding her of who and what she really is.

When we first meet Katherine (Kit for short) she is a fox, working on a long study of territory in the urban environment. She has a den - the space underneath a garden shed - and has adopted a young orphaned cub she calls Tomoko; her days are spent in sleep, her nights in scavenging and hunting. Her fox-body isn't a 'real' fox; her consciousness hasn't usurped some fox-consciousness. It's a ResExtenda - Ressy for short - a biologically complete and living model made at the Shencorp labs. The bones, flesh, organs, everything are constructed using a technology best described as God's own 3D printer. Observed mid-print the bodies are fascinating and horrifying:

"Lying in the wet gel is something that looks a little like the cross-sections found in biology textbooks. It's animal, that much is clear - it has stubs of what must be limbs and the fleshiness of an organic - but it's only half finished. The red plane of flesh is stippled with creamy blots like pepperoni; the half-finished organs look like ruptured sores. The skull is an empty bowl of bone. My skin prickles in pointless sympathy, even though there is no one, no hurt, to be sorry for. I never get used to this."

Each Ressy comes complete with a nervous system and instincts true to it's species but when not in use it is empty of self, a blank slate. Having no desires or impulses of their own Ressies both are and are not animals; they inhabit an ethically liminal territory between living beings and inanimate objects.

They can die though, if subjected to sufficient trauma or not adequately cared for by their Phenomenauts. One night, while chasing Tomoko in play, Kit is hit by a car and her Ressy is killed, thrusting her consciousness violently and traumatically back into her Original Body. The psychological toll of the shock is enormous, not least because of the loss of Tomoko. Projection is difficult at the best of times: the disorientation of the first hours in a new body, the adaptation to impaired or enhanced senses, followed by the wrenching shock of coming home again.

"Phenomenautism leaves you - what? Exhausted? Confused? No, it's more a sense of...slipping, of being stretched...like a snake trying to ingest a crocodile."

The cycle of dislocation and exploration, punctuated by periodic returns to human life is both addictive and disorienting, each Phenomenaut experiencing "innumerable incremental deaths." Teenagers - the younger the better - are best suited to it, the plasticity of their brains able to adapt best to being a spider one day and a blue whale the next.

After seven years and innumerable jumps Kit is nearing the end of her career and an unknown future that she finds hard to bear. If she isn't a Phenomenaut, if she is just an ordinary person without access to a myriad of different worlds and ways of being, then who is she? The intensity of her animal experiences have begun to erode her sense of self, alienating her from her Original Body.

"This Ressy isn't just an object, but a way of being me. This snout is mine - I am willing it - the sensation of scales imprints into my mind - I am those scales - the pressure of snout tracing along my length. Flesh and me."

She struggles with her human form, finding it safer and easier not to engage with its physicality. Her work means a shaved head, a pasty fleshy body, permanent canulas for her body support and catheter. Her personnel file blandly records that she exhibits signs of 'sexual retardation' and hasn't properly started her periods. Looking in the mirror, seeing her reflection, reminds Kit that each jump is a relief: "...thanks to Phenomenautism, I don't have to be either of those girls." She feels sure that other people must look and know that she's an imposter, that she isn't really human. "Can't they see through the thinness of skin?" she asks.

After the accident Kit's latest plasticity test results come back in the low range and she is thrown into despair. She is called to see Mr Hughe's Shencorp's CEO, sure she is about to be retired. Instead he offers her a once in a lifetime opportunity. Her long career and prestigious achievements have made her the prime candidate to be the face of Shencorp's latest venture: Tourism. They are about to launch the world's first commercial phenomenautical packages, offering the rich and adventurous the opportunity to become the animal of their choice. And animals are only the start. Once the time is right and the PR teams have massaged public opinion, the first human ResExtendas will be released onto the market. Kit is sceptical about the practicalities. How will tourists cope with the disorientation? Who will look after them in the wild? She is also horrified by the idea of using Ressies for entertainment. It offends both her professionalism and her morality. "A Ressy isn't a consumable," she protests. "Phenomenautism is meant to consume you." But if she wants to keep jumping, if she wants to preserve her own sense of self, what choice does she have but to play along?

~~~~~~~~~~

Emma Geen's debut novel lives and dies with the conceit of Phenomenautism and the strength of Kit as her protagonist. The former is the lock, the latter the key. When both are working smoothly together they open a rich thematic storehouse. Inside are questions about the basis of self, the individuality of conscious animals (including humans) and the subjectivities that shape our perceptions of the world.

The experience of projection challenges Kit to reevaluate all the tropes and assumptions of human/non-human perception, beginning with anthropomorphism. Face to face with a fellow octopus during a particularly disorienting jump she thinks: "However many times I come eye to eye with something so other, I am never prepared. B-moves make it seem so simple - kill them before they kill us. If peaceful, a simple 'take me to your leader' will suffice; after all most aliens are just blue space ladies beneath the tentacles. But octopuses have no language; no leader to be taken to if they had. And yet the octopus's eyes are studying me as intently as I am it." While she can never truly be an animal, she has seen and experienced enough to see through the unthinking human-centric world she returns to.

"The humans here always strike me as improbably perpendicular, every chin thrust out with the confidence of a silverback. What is it that gives them such assurance? As if they're all alphas. A suited man jostles past and I bare my teeth at his glare."

Set against the backdrop of a near-future where climate change has impacted the habitat of innumerable species and placed many on the verge of extinction, the continued arrogance of humans infuriates and saddens her. She recognises that a company like ShenCorp, ostensibly supporting research that will help to protect species in the future, has little interest in non-humans for their own sakes.

"For the longest time that's what I thought zoologists did - loved. It was a shock when I started at Shencorp and realised that some people were more interested in animals in the abstract. That the environment was The Environment, a creature the authority of its Latin name, sightings to collect like butterflies pinned to blotting paper, collecting a second fur of dust."

Kit was motivated to become a Phenomenaut by a love of nature instilled in her by her mother who, she remembers, always saw "creatures in their individuality."

The Many Selves of Katherine North is about what happens when this individuality is eroded. Shencorp and it's shift in focus from Research to Tourism, from animal ResExtenda to human dopplegangers, is a lesson about the "bottomless stomach that will consume anything." While Kit might fervently believe that "other subjectivities aren't a consumer item" the limitless ambition of consumerism on display in the company boardroom would suggest other perspectives.

These are big topics and especially meaningful to me at the moment, coming up to my one year anniversary of being vegan. The subjectivities of non-human animals and what I think should be the limits of the commercial transaction are at the basis of my decision to reduce my involvement in animal-based industries as much as possible. For me though Geen doesn't always take full advantage of the possibilities of the world she has created, to delve more fully into the moral problem of the ResExtenda and into the repercussions for a society in which life is created, bought and sold. While Kit is a fascinating narrator the intensely personal nature of the story means that there is less room to explore the significant ramifications of a broader future. As the novel ended I found myself feeling nonplussed at the neatness of the denouement, looking around for something more than an end to her story.

In the acknowledgements Geen draws a line between the psychological experience of phenomenautism and "the magic of fiction, which invites the reader not only to slip into the lived experiences of other people but also to share, for a while, the cares and joys of their narrative journeying." The book is, she says, less about science and the future and more "a fantastical wardrobe of skins". It is most certainly a powerful provoking journey, beautifully written, well crafted and recommended, but when the final skin is shucked off and shed, what are we left with?

Monday, May 23, 2016

The 2nd of June seems to be this year's fashionable publication date for all the books designed to appeal to me. I count four ARCs on my TBR coming out that day and all of them sound ruddy amazing. I've been psyching myself up for a personal mini-challenge of reading them in quick and glorious succession, so that I can write about them in the run up to the Big Day. First up is a debut by Eleanor Wasserberg, a recent graduate from the UEA Creative Writing course, that nursery of shiny and fresh talent. I'll admit it: in the first instance it was that glorious cover that had my request finger clickety-clicking on Netgalley. Isn't it beautiful? In the moments after I give in to temptation like that there is always a moment of uncertainty; I've been disappointed by things in lovely packages before. My fears were quickly allayed: Foxlowe has game from the beginning.

At Foxlowe everyone had two names. One is secret, meant to be lost. For most, it worked like this: first they had the one they came to Foxlowe with peeled away like sunburnt skin. Then a new name, a new life.

I used to get jealous of the Family with their secret outside names, while I only had the one, like half a person. Sometimes an old name would slip, strangled at a syllable with a blush. This was a sign to watch for, in case someone might wish to become a Leaver.

Now I am doubled that way, named twice, but for me it worked in reverse: my new name came later, on the outside, like putting on that crusty old skin that should be lying on the floor.

Our narrator is Green, the first and only child born into the Family, a hippy community of artists and outcasts. She is named auspiciously for the Joni Mitchell song "Little Green": Choose her a name she will answer to/Call her green and the winters cannot fade her/Call her green for the children who've made her/Little green, be a gypsy dancer. Standing at a distance of many years she looks back at a childhood spent running wild through the broken-down grandeur and grounds of Foxlowe, a stately home inherited by the community's founder Richard. Totally isolated from the outside world, with only the occasional glimpse of Outsiders on the neighbouring moorland, her life is shaped by the influence of the Family's matriarch Freya. From her Green learns a stark morality in which the Good is caught in an eternal cosmological struggle against the Bad. The Good is renewed each year at the summer solstice where the Family observe a ritual at the nearby standing stones, watching the sun go down and then, miraculously, rise again before setting a second time. This is a time for celebration - for homebrew made in the bath tub, for flower garlands and dancing, for healing, for triumph over the dark things of the world. The Bad is never completely banished though, stealing through Foxlowe's defences wherever they are weakest. Everything from the outside is Bad; Outsiders are drenched in it. It must always be guarded against.

The Bad thrives on the dark and the cold; it is a winter force. So be careful when the sun is weak, and the air bites you. Stay off the moor, where the Bad is strong. If the Bad catches you there, run to the Standing Stones. Even in the winter the Stones hum with a thousand ancient blessings. If you are closer to Foxlowe, run so you are inside the Scattering Salt.

Green knows that "children are the easiest for the Bad to slip into. They must be watched." If the Bad gets into them it has to be purged with punishments. The Spike Walk - a line of nails driven into a wall at the perfect height for children to run their bare arms against - works, as do flames against soft young skin. If the Bad persists then they have to be Edged, excluded from the life of the house and from all human contact. They shouldn't be touched, spoken to, fed or even looked at.

Green isn't the only child at Foxlowe, although she has the distinction of being the only one born there. Toby - short for October - came with his mother Valentina as a young boy and learnt the rules of the place as he went. Blue arrived as a tiny baby, taken from god knows where and from whom, arriving in Freya's arms in the night. With a handful of years between them the three grow together on a diet of freedom and wilderness, with off-hand affection offset a regime of regular punishment. There is no electricity and no heat apart from what they can make themselves. All possessions are shared and the adults only go out irregularly to buy the food supplies that they can't grow themselves. Everyone takes it in turns to cook. The children are often hungry for food and for stimulation. Starved of possessions they hoard little bits of treasure, fragments of mirrors and shells, knowledge of a bird's nest.

The values of freedom, creativity and self-sufficiency that underpin the commune are barely glimpsed through Green's incomplete understanding of the Foxlowe enterprise. For her it isn't a social experiment or a dippy hippy ideal; nor is it the hell of deprivation and abuse that it seems to us as outsiders. It is her home, and the difficult, sometimes dangerous love of the adults that she grows up with is all she has ever known. Even as an adult in the wider world she yearns to return to the place where she was cherished, hurt and neglected in turn.

If I could speak to Freya, I'd tell her not to worry, because I hold my new name ever so lightly, ready to shrug it off, if ever Foxlowe could start up again.

Stories are important to Green. She grew up in an oral tradition without TV or books - she can barely read - and her desire to tell and retell her childhood memories are strong. You know that by the time she recounts them to us they have been polished as smooth as eggs. They are modeled on a narrative style that she learnt from Freya, weighted with ritual and moral significance and measured neatly out. There is Blue's arrival, the coming and going of Family members, the turn of the year from winter to summer solstice, the Crisis. Sometimes, she says, she can almost hear Freya's voice and Freya's words in her own. She is passing on something canonical and crafted, circling closer and closer to a terrible final story, a story about Blue and the end of Foxlowe.

Green's memories seem crystal clear, if tinged with a peculiar nostalgia. Although she was still only a child when the commune was disbanded she speaks with great authority and certainty about how things were and about why they were that way. It is only slowly that the gaps in her perception, the failure to understand what really happened to her, are revealed. Her continued love and affection for her old life becomes queasy. Gradually, craftily, Green emerges as an unreliable and disturbed narrator, whose sense of self is bound up with a narrative about the world that, in adulthood, is a kind of psychosis. She thinks she is telling us one story about the Family - how happy they were, how perfect - when actually she is telling us something entirely opposite. The founding element of her mythos, the Crisis of the Bad and how Freya overcame it by the power of the Solstice, is given to us baldly.

Freya hoped that the Bad would leave once the sun became stronger, but instead it screamed and howled and scratched at her, it gnawed at her breast, it made her bleed. No one wanted to hold it, no one wanted to touch it. It was shut away in the attic until we could decide what to do. Freya knew it was the Bad, but the others were too afraid to say it. We survived it by wrapping it tight so it couldn't rage too hard, and not looking it in the eye, or touching it too much.

That Green herself was the Bad of this story, that Freya was mentally unwell and that the Family were complicit in her abuse is barely conscious to her. She tells it to convince us, and perhaps herself, that Foxlowe was a Good place.

Wasserberg's novel is a careful study in how tenuous reality is, how easily warped we are by the perspectives that we inhabit and how fragile our sense of self is. The trick of the book is how rounded a view we get, not only of Green, but of Toby and Blue and of the adult members of the commune. In spite of the self-imposed limits of narration Foxlowe works, obliquely, to humanise even the most despicable of its actors: spineless Richard, feckless Valentina, even Freya. Its great strength in this is the time it gives to Green's adult life, a surprise in books like this and its point of difference from others of its kind. I appreciated that we got to know so much about what became of her, how her childhood translated into the adult she became. What a haunting and in comprehensible translation it proves to be, in spite of her namesake song lyrics.

Child with a child pretendingWeary of lies you are sending homeSo you sign all the papers in the family nameYou're sad and you're sorry but you're not ashamedLittle green have a happy ending

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Just a year ago the look, feel and blurb for this book would have sent me running for Bailey's Prize hill and the safety of my comfort zone post-haste. A carpenter has a dark night of the quietly masculine soul in mid-2000s California against the back drop of war in Afghanistan and Iraq? Take note of how I'm trying to extend my reading repetoire by trusting to the judgement of Granta and ploughing on in. As brave ventures go, this one turned out surprisingly well. Journeyman so beguiled me in the first third with its textured landscapes and subtle handling of its protagonist that I swallowed the frenzied dialogue and fireworks of the rest without too much trouble. Arriving finally at the redemptive ending I was glad to have been along for the ride. On the one hand Bojanowski is a clever and serious writer, careful to load and layer every word of his second novel; Eleanor is right to call him a writer of themes. Peel the plot off the book and it's all cogs and wheels, ticking over in the harmonious production of Meaning with a capital M. At the same time Journeyman is an oddly sweet and romantic piece, with a crooked-smile of a love story running through it and a protagonist straight out of a rom-com. It's unlikely: imagine if Nicholas Sparks and Bret Easton Ellis did a team up.

Nolan Jackson is a wanderer, a serial abandoner of family, friends and women. As a journeyman carpenter he flits from construction site to construction site, building identikit tract homes in Nevada, California, Oregon, New Mexico, never staying long enough to make or keep long term relationships. At the first sign of discomfort or complication he hitches his Airstream trailer, his home for the last thirteen years, and drives off into the dust. There is always work down the road for a skilled man who keeps to himself. When he witnesses a terrible accident at his most recent job in Las Vegas he drops his new girlfriend Linda and flees back to California, first for a brief visit to his mother and then a courtesy call on his older brother Chance. He is running from a niggling sense of helplesness, "the feeling he despises the most", folling himself into believing that he has everything he needs in the confines of his mobile world.

But then he is the victim of a freak accident of his own. A car jumps the barrier of a bridge and falls onto his parked truck and trailer. The wreck ignites and everything goes up in flames, his crafted and salvaged belongings along with his life savings in a tin can and his tools. His life is reset, wiped clean, and he is forced back on the charity of his brother and a couch in his garage. The omniscient narrator is unequivocal about what his happened to him: "for nearly half his life Nolan's worked to fashion order in the world. He's cut and joined rock, metal, plastic, wire and wood, and still mastery eludes him. Still it wills away and what he works something into, change and time undo elegantly and infinitely, beyond his ken of patience and perception, everything new commencing towards unravel and decay." Left with nothing but the skill of his labour Nolan is given the rare opportunity to remake his life into something new and unlooked for.

The setting and detail of the novel is teeth-achingly modern. Bojanowski is fixated with the paraphanalia of 21st century life - wires and data, commercialisation and tourism, the Disneyfication of the past - and how they impact on the contemporary psyche. The fascination is shared by Chance, Nolan's troubled alcoholic brother. A writer himself, Chance has changed his name to Cosmo and spends his days elaborating grand conspiracy theories in Burnridge, a heritage town eaten up by its own manufactured self image. He is working on a magnum opus about a forgotten Russian naval battle that he imagines is the progenitor of the great changes of the 20th century, envisioning a maddening web of connectivity that both illuminates and binds the present moment, "the macrocosmic loom, a real nightmare web of knowing." He is obsessed with the work of a local arsonist, who he imagines is motivated to burn down second homes and sabotage a visiting film crew out of a desire to expose the hypocrisy and parody of the present moment.

By contrast Nolan is a man out of time, a craftsman whose identity as a journeyman is as old as the Middle Ages and whose vision of the world stretches into deep time. Stopping in Death Valley on his way home to California he surveys the view with a geological imagination:

"Before him, horizontal bands of tawny and red run almost perpendicular to slender upthrusts of brown and black. Nolan traces rilles and gullies with his eyes, follows the flow down deep gulches and along distant waterlines of an ancient lake. To the north, Manly Beacon, shaped by desert downpours. A range of consistencies set before him, stages and methods of erosion. Someplace in the gradual upheaval and sink, fossilized animal tracks and grasses and reeds that once swayed beneath the same sun."

He disavows the internet or mobile phones. He has no virtual life and instead focuses on the work of his hands in building, cooking and gardening. He is connected to people and places not by data but by the things that he has made, and by the culture of cowboy masculinity that he works hard to cultivate. He armours himself with a Stetson and a pair of boots, a stoic taciturn demeanour and a quiet competance like a creature out of myth. Juxtaposed against the realities of California in 2007, and of the Iraq war, it would be easy to dismiss Nolan's manufactured sense of self as ridiculous. We are expressly instructed not to: "his shadow cast before him, lean and tall and jean-jacketed and wearing his white Western hat. We maintain narratives, however false, to survive. Cosmo does. You do. Grant him his lies as he grants you yours." The direct authorial intrusion leaves no room for mistake: Nolan is to be taken seriously.

Journeyman is interested in what it means for a man to be his own master, to live life according to his values and beliefs. Through Nolan and Chance (and, second hand, the experiences of their Vietnam veteran father) Bojanowski explores the paradox of individualism in every day life. On the surface of things both men are entirely independent. Nolan has made an art of charting a course that suits him alone, while Chance - divorced, distant from his mother and brother - can live his life exactly as he pleases. Both have strong and divergent views about what being a man in the world should mean, about what a good life and civilisation looks like. Yet they are trapped into the identities they have chosen for themselves - loner cowboy; dogged hack journalist - unwittingly participating in the constriction of their actions, spokes in the great turning wheel of capitalist politics. Both have a sneaking suspicion that they have missed out on something meaningful, in this case the cause of the war against terror. Nolan tells his mother: "I feel like sometimes the one thing I could have done in my life to make a difference came and went... To fight for something like that, yeah. Some men feel that." The brothers respond to that loss in ways that makes most sense to them. For Chance this means raging against the dissolution of modern America and the people he feels most represent it; for Nolan it means retreating to the safety of his carefully crafted persona.

It's easy for state of the nation books to overdo the despair and hypocrisy of modern life for me; if I look too closely at the extremes of the way we live now, I start to feel greasy and unpleasant. In this case Nolan's character saves the day, with its essential romantic qualities. You can't help but feel warmth for a man who doesn't mind riding a woman's pink bike to work on a building site, makes himself elaborate salads, doesn't curse, has a dry sense of humour and sorts nails into neat piles to calm his mind. He wants to love and be loved, a builder not a destroyer. By the time the credits roll the soul of Journeyman seems to belong to Sparks rather than Easton Ellis, and the world isn't without hope.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

I liked Jo Baker's retelling of Pride and Prejudice, Longbourn, a great deal. It was a sweet and delightful book, a dreamy tactile romance that riffed on Austen without trying to echo her wit. I'm incredibly excited to hear it is being made into a film. Her new novel A Country Road, A Tree is not that book, and is both better and worse for it. It has the same spirit, but a new ambition: this time to tell the story of an author rather than their character, the enigmatic and determinedly unknowable Samuel Beckett.

We meet him first in 1919 as a nameless boy climbing a favourite tree, avoiding his insistent mother and the strictures of piano practice. The bark is smooth from the repeated knowledge of his hands, his feet certain on the ascent. Once perched up high he chooses to fall rather than climb down again.

He sucked in breath. It tasted of sap, and of spring, and of his rubbery tennis shoes. He let go of the branch; he let go of the trunk. He lifted his arms and spread them wide. He leaned out. The pause on the cusp, the brink. He dived out into the empty air. Gravity snatched him.

When he has his breath back, he climbs up and does it again, on the understanding that sooner or later he will catch the air and soar up in flight. This determination to do everything the hard way, which is also a gluttony for punishment, is a core pillar of his character and echoes throughout the book. The boy who throws himself out of trees in the hope that he will learn to fly becomes a man who will risk his life and the lives of the people who care for him in order to write.

Fast forward to 1939 and the declaration of war, which finds Beckett temporarily in Dublin with his mother after a long sojourn in Paris. Despite the new danger he is desperate to get back there: he can't think, can't sleep, can't write in her presence, as stifled as by the piano lessons of old. His need to be unfettered is physical, pathological. Once back in France and reunited with Suzanne, the woman who will become his lifelong partner, he embarks on a wartime of resistance, transience and deprivation. At first all is much as it was. He moves in a circle of Francophile artists, writers and thinkers that includes Joyce and Duchamp, playing the role of protégé and amanuensis to their fading brilliance. Suzanne gives him space to work, such as it is - vague unpromising scribbles she thinks - and they muddle along in spite of the shortages and worsening news from the east. Then, June 1940 and the fall of France to the Nazis. Beckett and his circle are unmoored, sent fleeing into the unknown countryside, running from the oncoming tide; Joyce heads towards Switzerland, where he will soon die, while Beckett and Suzanne go south. It is the beginning of a five year season of fragmentation, disorientation, fear, hunger and desperation.

Throughout Beckett - who is always 'he' and 'him', never named - experiences a complex frisson of duty, excitement and lethargy that lead him to join the French resistance, and to keep on resisting even when it threatens his life. He has a resistant sort of personality, which seeks friction to generate the state of mind needed for his writing. His pre-war novel Murphy has disappeared without a trace and his later success is in the unimagined future; he is just a penniless failure with a compulsion to put pen to paper and no clue what else he is good for. It is not even as if he enjoys it, gets satisfaction from it. A fellow writer suggests the crux of it: "If one is not writing, one is not quite oneself, don't you find? ... It's like snails make slime," she's saying, "One will never get along, much less be comfortable, if one doesn't write." It is that old idea, that for some people words are like air and writing is like breathing.

It is in his wartime experiences that Baker locates the grit that propels Beckett to later success. Throughout she seeds echoes of Beckett's work: the title is a reference to the apocalyptic scene at the beginning of Waiting for Godot, while a fixation on feet, on life going inexorably onwards foreshadows later works. His well known conflicted relationship with ideas of home and belonging, place and family are threaded through the book. In Dublin in 1939 he is given a small stone by a cousin, a pebble from a local beach, and he carries it throughout the war like a talisman, popping it in his mouth to suck when he is hungry or thirsty. It is necessary to him, "the precious one a child's clean eye had selected from all the stones at Greystones". By the end of the war it has ground down and damaged his teeth, causing him physical pain even while it gives him emotional comfort.

Baker paints a complex picture of a contrary personality, a man who is strangely distant and emotionless on the one hand - Suzanne accuses him of being cold to his and her suffering, of being unnaturally calm - and who on the other is overwhelmed by subterranean currents of feeling so enormous and desperate that he would rather starve in a war torn city than live in the comfort of his mother's house. He connects both easily and not at all, his broad intelligence making it simple to adapt and fit in while his prickling discomfort with himself puts a barrier and distance against ordinary relationships.

Sentence by sentence A Country Road, A Tree was pure pleasure, precisely to my reading taste. Like it's subject the book is dual and janiform, clean lines of plot and dialogue on the one hand and elliptical philosophy on the other. It has the playfulness of Longbourn (it can even be quite funny) but with a new discipline, a seriousness that suits Baker's style very well. She manages to walk the tightrope of pretentiousness without wobbling over much. There was a great difficulty though, niggling me throughout my reading. Beckett is an ambitious proposition, whose output is notoriously challenging, and what I have read of him doesn't resonate with the man Jo Baker has created. She has captured someone in their complexity very well, but perhaps not that specific someone. So it's a good thing that she has built in an escape hatch by making him anonymous with baited hints to his identity. It means there are two ways of reading the book: as if it's about Beckett, an insight into his life, his process as a writer, his self-hood; or ignoring that altogether and choosing to see only a nameless writer, occupied France, the resistance, the hunger of it. I much prefer the latter, which means that the power of Jo Baker's prose, the beauty of what she has created, is not overshadowed by the enormity of her subject.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

May is proving to be a bright and gregarious month, of sunshine and chatter. All of my reading has been in the interstices of days, so that the work busyness of April has just been substituted by social busyness. Still there is plenty getting done and I have read some fantastic things already. So I guess I should probably finish off my April round-up before time marches on too far and my thoughts on things get blurry with distance. This time I only have three books to talk about, as the final novel of the month - Annie Proulx's Barkskins - is going to get a post all of it's own.

The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah (Faber and Faber, 2015)

First up is Petina Gappah's The Book of Memory. This debut novel has been long awaited, ever since Gappah's short story collection An Elegy for Easterly was listed for the Guardian First Book Award and won my heart back in 2010. Around the time that I wrote my review of the short stories I was emailing back and forth with Gappah's publicist and remember her saying that a novel was on the way, expected in 2011. It turns out that was a premature announcement, and it's taken another five years for the book to come into the world. Was it worth the wait? Yes in some ways and no in others.

Our narrator, the eponymous Memory, is the only woman in Zimbabwe on death row. When we meet her she has been held at the notorious Chikurubi super-prison in Harare for almost three years, waiting to find out if the endless appeals process will see her sentence commuted or reduced. She swears she is innocent of the murder she stands accused of, the shooting of a wealthy white man called Lloyd. Having been given paper and pen by a visiting American journalist - her position is so unusual she warrants international interest - she sets about spinning her own story of what really happened. As she interweaves her present life at Chikurubi with the long-ago memories of her childhood, the story unfolds slowly and deliberately, spun out for full effect. It hinges on one quite unbelievable claim: that Memory's parents sold her to Lloyd as a child, and that she grew up with him as an adopted daughter. She says that he loved her and that she loved him, and that his death was not her fault. She suggests that all of this happened, in part, because she has albinism.

Memory's storytelling is a compulsion, apparently against her normal inclination. At the beginning she shies away from the limelight; "I spent much of my life trying to be invisible" she says. This need to be unseen is partly physical - sunlight burns and blisters her skin, so she has to keep to margins and shadows - and partly psychological. As a young child still living with her parents she learnt to stay clear of her mother's moods and headaches, to be as inoffensive and ordinary as possible. It's not easy though when the colour of your skin is like a beacon of difference; people can't help but look at you. The looking changes tone when she is adopted by Lloyd. Viewed at a distance she can be mistaken for a white girl, and it's only when people get up close that their faces register that she is black. She goes to an excellent school, learns to ride, goes to parties and benefits from the world of white privilege while never truly feeling part of it. Lloyd's sister Alexandra dislikes her intensely while the local socialites tolerate her as an eccentricity; Lloyd's black house staff treat her with distaste like a strange hybrid animal. When she is accused of Lloyd's murder her albinism is used against her, used to imply that their relationship was some sort of fetishistic perversion and that she is mentally unsound. The faint whiff of bad luck and witch craft hangs on her.

In prison though there is no point in being silent. Memory has to speak up for herself. The story she tells is shaped by issues of race - most clearly played through her own body - but also of class, religion and sexuality. The Zimbabwe she describes is fragmented, chaotic and messy, a place tied in knots with indigenous traditions and colonial morals, where it is difficult for difference of any kind to fit in and grow. Like in An Elegy for Easterly, humour, love and generosity creep into people's life in spite of their context rather than because of it. Gappah builds a world rich with emotional and ethical complexity from these parts.

And so what was it about the book that disappointed me? Foremost I think it was the clunkiness of the unrealiable narration. We are given great whomping clues that this is a book about memory, story and identity from the start; there may as well be a flashing billboard over the title that says "You're going to have to live with the lies and omissions before you find out the truth!". Because I knew it was coming I saw it everywhere, and got frustrated that the obsfucation had to happen before the clarity. Memory dips back and forth in time to a tricky beat but for the first half of the book she tells us very little of anything to move the story on. She dodges and blurs bits of the past in such an obvious way that you know what and where things are being saved for a reveal later on. To some extent you can explain this by her long years of training as a reader. Memory is a lover of books and stories, some of which have clearly influenced her style and she knows what to do to create suspense. Still this only explains so much of the clumsiness and it repeatedly took me out of the story.

I went into this on the understanding that I was entering the realm of fun and fluffdom and verily I was not disappointed. This rather slender first volume collects issues 1-3 of this middle grade comic together and has an eye-catching energetic art-style that I very much enjoyed. Shannon Watter's visuals are busier than Stevenson's in Nimona (this time she writes rather than illustrates) and feature a forest palette of greens, browns and reds that are lovely on the eye. The setting is Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's Camp for Hardcore Lady Types where aspiring Lumberjanes spend their summers earning badges in survival and adventure. Our five heroines are variously and gloriously unphased by whatever life throws at them, be that three-eyed foxes, white water rapids or mathematical puzzles. Whatever happens their motto of "Friendship to the max!" never fails them. Each comic features a self-contained adventure, though all are linked together by a warning about something called the Kitten Holy which, to be honest, I didn't really follow but hey I was too busy enjoying myself to care.

Things I loved about Lumberjanes:

The art I mentioned already, but more generally the production values for this comic are fantastic. Each new story is wrapped around with excerpts from the Lumberjanes handbook and "polaroid photos" which make the whole thing feel immersive.

Like the Rat Queens (but without the swearing, sex and bloodbaths) the Lumberjanes are diverse and differentiated. Jo, April, Mal, Molly and Ripley run a wide spectrum of representation in terms of body shape, skills and personality, and they have fun just being themselves. This might sound twee but it's done in a natural and unforced way that I would have definitely appreciated age 10 and still appreciate now.

The girls look out for and care for one another. When they interact with adults or boys they still work together and nobody suddenly decides to switch teams because they got a better offer.

I'm really looking forward to Vol. 2.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (Spiegal & Grau, 2015)

I haven't read a lot of non-fiction yet this year, but as soon as I heard about this book I knew I had to read it. Bryan Stevenson is a director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal non-profit that supports defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair treatment by the US justice system. EJI works particularly with children and young adults who are serving sentences in adult prisons and with people on death row; you won't be surprised to discover that race and poverty are significant factors in the cases they cover. Just Mercy tells the story of Stevenson's early law career and the founding of EJI through the lens of one particular death row case - the wrongful conviction of Walter McMillian - interspersed with insights into the imbalance and bias of the justice system.

The death penalty is something that I feel incredibly strongly about, and an issue that I find very hard to debate reasonably. The only time I have ever completely 'broken up' with a friend it was about the death penalty. I'm very glad to live in a country where it no longer happens, though it continues to worry me how often I see 'Bring Back Hanging' posts on Facebook. Stevenson's book didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about the stats and the key arguments for and against, but it did bring death row into painfully clear focus. Some of the stories and experiences of racism, sexism and pure bloody mindedness he recounts from the last 30 years are boggling. My heart was broken and stomped all over multiple times; I cried several times when final injunctions were denied and people were put to death. There is no doubt at all that EJI do astonishing and necessary work.

I'd recommend Just Mercy on these grounds alone, but I have to add some caveats. Stevenson has a penchant for the inspirational encounter and some of his anecdotes can feel massaged to suit the mood. He reports conversations with elderly ladies in courthouses and mentally ill prisoners verbatim at twenty years remove in a style that is occasionally too winsome and self-helpy for my preference. He also tries too hard sometimes to spin the tragic stories of his clients, especially the ones who admit to commiting the crime they are accused of. Extenuating circumstances, context, mental health are all reasons why I don't believe in death sentences, but I think perpetrator-as-victim rhetoric too often turns people off the argument. It opens the door wide to the "you care more about the murderer than the victim" accusation that gets nobody anywhere.

Saturday, May 07, 2016

A quick, darting review today, in lieu of my second April wrap up post. We had a lovely display from The Borough Press at work in the library recently, and multiple copies of Rob Ewing's debut novel stacked for people to borrow. It reminded me that I had a proof sitting on my Kindle, idling it's engine and waiting for the moment when I would be in the mood for a book described as The Lord of the Flies meets Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. Well the sun is shining, the birds are singing, I thought, no time like the present to embark on a devastatingly dark dystopian novel set on a remote Scottish island. I gorged it in two sittings and a single day. It's compulsively readable and I absolutely could not sleep until I had laid the child protagonists to rest.

Our narrator Rona is 8 or 9 years old, the middle 'sibling' of a strange adopted family. She lives on an otherwise deserted island with little Alex, who is five, and big girl Elizabeth, who at eleven might be the oldest living person in the world. They follow a set of non-negotiable rules - only drink the sterilised water, smell food before you eat it, always carry your whistle for emergencies - and try to carry on living the way they did before it happened. They walk to school each day, where they are joined by the only two other survivors, brothers Calum Ian and Duncan, and go over the same pages of their school textbooks. They go to the playground, watch DVDs on an old portable battery powered player they found and go shopping. They have exhausted most of the 'old shopping' - the Co-Op and the post office are mostly empty - but there is still plenty of 'new shopping'. They explore house after house in the village, taking what they need. For old time's sake they knock before they go in. It isn't too bad, although sometimes a house is bad. Bad houses have a smell, maybe a dead dog or cat, too often a dead person.

Rona only has a child's bare bones knowledge of what happened to her mum and all the other adults. She knows that people started to get sick around last Christmas time; that at first there were ambulances, hospital treatment, people in face masks and white suits. Later there were emergency centres for the growing number of cases, road blocks and food shortages, rising panic. Eventually there were just dead people, some in body bags, others just left to rot where they fell. The school gym, the community centre are now fly-infested mausoleums. As far as Rona and the other children know they are the only survivors. Terribly scarred by the mystery illness and left for dead, they are waiting in hope of being found. Both Rona and the brothers are clinging to a belief that their parents survived and escaped; Elizabeth and Alex know that theirs are dead, have seen their slack blackened faces.

The comparison to The Lord of the Flies is only valid insofar as The Last of Us is about what might happen if five children found themselves alone on a deserted island. Using only their limited understanding and their sometimes flawed reasoning they have to work out how to live together and deal with what has happened to them as best as they can. Although Ewing doesn't shy away from how difficult and challenging this is - as you would expected, all the children are deeply traumatised - his isn't a novel about the savagery of youth or the victory of the id over the veneer of civilisation. Taking their cue from Elizabeth, whose constant refrain is "What will work? Teamwork", Rona and the others try to do what is best for one another. They share, they are kind, they reassure and comfort one another. They have maintained some of the rituals and values of their parents, internalising all those occasions they have been told to treat other people as you would like to be treated or if they have nothing nice to say, they shouldn't say anything at all.

Of course anger, silliness, hurt do get the better of them sooner or later, leading to acts of betrayal and damage that in adults would look like terrible melodrama but in children ring true. It is a chain of such events that powers the propulsive plot of the book, beginning with a thoughtless act of selfishness that threatens to destroy the equilibrium that Elizabeth has built. Calum Ian and Duncan steal a prized tin of hot-dogs from Rona and Alex and later that day, buzzing with righteous indignation, Rona breaks into their house, takes a digital camera of photographs of their family and erases them all. In the moment she doesn't realise the terrible implications of what she has done, or the disproportion in her retaliation. It is only afterwards that she begins to understand what she has stolen.

Child narrators are difficult animals, and Rona is no different. Despite Ewing's attempt to capture some of the disconnect and fragmentation of her nine-year old voice, her focus on cause and effect and on the feelings of others serves the workings of the narrative more than her realism. Occasionally the dialogue is twee: Alex speaks in truncated babyish sentences, except where it needs to be otherwise, and Calum Ian has more articulacy in anger than your average ten year old boy. There isn't always balance between the children's reasonable fear of danger and death and their madcap ideas for being saved.

Still in spite of this, the claustrophobia of the island setting and the unpredictability of the actors make The Last of Us desperately compelling. As Rona takes us deeper and deeper into the extremity of their situation, beginning to unpick her memories of her mother and what happened during the epidemic, it is impossible not to engage emotionally. What could be more horrifying then being surrounded by the remnants of all the people that you knew and spoke to, not knowing if you are all that's left to show for human kind? Ewing is mostly successful in spinning out how this scenario might lay siege to a young mind, eroding their memories and niceties, threatening the viability of a future. What kind of new world would Rona and her friends build as adults, carrying around the knowledge of what they have seen and the loss of almost everything they have loved?

Sunday, May 01, 2016

April was a thesis-heavy month, with most of my reading and writing energy going into preparation for my upgrade from provisional PhD status to confirmed we-think-you’ll-really-get-a-doctorate status. At York the process is quite formal, involving submission of a complete thesis chapter and a mini viva with a panel of academics from other departments. To cut a long story short: I was quite stressed and panicked about it; there was much frenzied drafting and redrafting of my chapter up to the last minute; but in the end I passed and ‘confirmed’ fine. Phew.

It slowed my leisure reading down a bit and my blogging down a lot, but I can’t complain: the excellent year continues. I read six and a half novels (including Annie Proulx’s new book Barkskins, a behemoth weighing in at 736 pages), two graphic novels and a non-fiction book in April. It was up and down in terms of quality: I read both the best book of the year so far – Sarah Moss’s Signs for Lost Children – and the worst – Pierce Brown’s Red Rising. At first I thought I would be able to round up the lot in one post, but quickly realised that wasn’t going to work out; I thought I didn't have lot to say about each one, but the words do mount up. So here followeth the first of a two part overview. The only book I won’t be writing about is Barkskins, which isn’t out until June and needs a full review.

After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry (Serpents Tail, 2014)

This has been sitting on my shelves ever since it came out in paperback and I was finally prompted to pick it up by the arrival of an ARC of Perry’s new novel, The Essex Serpent (which also comes out in June – June is going to be a mad crazy month for new releases). I hate to read a new book by a writer who is already languishing on my TBR, especially if the book I have is a debut. I admit to some trepidation at the beginning. I know you shouldn’t trust Goodreads but this book has taken a beating of one and two star reviews there that put its average rating around 2.5. I’m here to tell you that rating is WRONGHEADED and MISLEADING.

There is a heatwave. As the novel opens England is entering its second month of utterly clear skies and people are retreating into the darkness of their homes or out of the cities. John Cole, our narrator, is amongst them. He closes up his London bookshop and sets out to drive to his brother’s house on the Norfolk coast. He imagines playing with his two nephews in the sea; sitting around his brother’s kitchen table. But without a map he quickly gets lost. Dazed, confused and dehydrated he abandons his car in a wood and stumbles into the grounds of a dilapidated country house, planning to ask them for a drink and directions. Instead he is met by Clare, a childlike young woman who greets him by name, welcomes him and shows him to a room. She has been expecting him all day.

So begins John’s weeklong stay with Clare and her adopted family of misfits: an evangelical minister who has lost his faith, a mercurial pianist who can’t face the outside world, an auditor who has left everything behind for love and a young man obsessed with the possibility that the reservoir dam that borders the grounds of the house will collapse and drown them all. While the weather holds the house and its inhabitants seem suspended between real and imagined worlds, John is increasingly seduced by the idea that he belongs there with them.

After Me Comes the Flood is a study in the uncanny, spinning a narrative that is grounded in reality – named places, named people, back stories – but shot through with otherness. While there are plausible and realistic readings for each character and their actions, they exist equally on the level of parable, allegory and dream. It seems possible that John has wandered into purgatory, or dreamscape, or a community of people recovering from mental illness. Perhaps he has died, or had a nervous breakdown. Perhaps he is a self-important fantasist. Perry admits and allows all of these interpretations.

The book is a sort of puzzle box that you need to turn around and around in your hands to appreciate. It isn’t a page-turner by any measure of the imagination, and it’s distinctly odd in parts, but it’s gloriously written and teeth-sinkingly devious. If you don’t mind the unanswered questions and the fever-dream intensity, then I think you will like it a great deal.

I have developed a naughty counterproductive habit of reading Saga when my brain is half asleep. I devoured Volume 4 in a Travelodge in Dundee after a 4 ½ hour train journey and a 10 hour day at work. You could argue I didn’t give it the attention it deserves but since I’ll probably come back and read it all again one day when the story is finished I forgive myself. Hazel’s family saga continues into her toddler years here, at a time when her mum is working on an intergalactic soap opera and getting into drugs and her dad is feeling increasingly lonely and isolated as a stay-at-home parent. Although this volume introduced yet more characters and was packed with frenetic action it felt rather like treading water. The action was diffused across the widening cast and themes of conflict, class warfare and identity politics so that the tightness of the storytelling in the earlier volumes was lost. It’s starting to look like this story could go on forever with diminishing returns.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown (Hodder, 2014)

No. I set Red Rising aside at just under halfway, my first DNF (did-not-finish) of 2016. I was intrigued by the concept of Brown’s caste-bound universe, and the dynamics of privilege and service that maintained it, but was almost instantly turned off by the half-baked plot and characters.

Our protagonist Darrow is a Red, a Helldiver on a mining crew deep under the surface of Mars. At 16 he is already married and over half way through his life. Like all the other Reds he believes that his brutal and brief existence is a noble sacrifice in service of the good of civilisation. Earth is dying and the fuel he mines is necessary to terraform Mars and save humanity. When he finds out that this is a lie perpetuated by the Golds – society's privileged elites – to keep him and his kind in servitude he is justifiably angry. When his wife is executed for a futile act of resistance he swears revenge and, barely escaping with his own life, joins a guerrilla army intent on revolution. He is given a special mission: infiltrate the Golds from within, become one of them and then tear them down.

Sounds exciting right? Instead I found it dogged, wearisome and predictable. It wears its influences very boldly: an odd mixture of Harry Potter and the Hunger Games with some scenes almost ripped directly from the page. But it is even more violent and brutal than the latter. By the mid-point it had devolved into a riot of violence and unkindness that wore me out. I’m not squeamish but there is a limit to how much humiliation, torture and rape I can stomach. The problem was not that these things happen in the book but that these things *were* the book. Without them *nothing* would be happening. A group of teenagers would be sitting around in a forest staring at one another.

The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, I)by Stephen King (Hodder, 2012, originally 1982)

The joint power of Teresa and Jenny from Shelf Love and Idris Elba convinced me that I should embark on the long epic journey to Stephen King’s Dark Tower. Esther’s mum is a big fan too and lent me her old paperbacks. This first slim volume was so not what I expected: it’s verbose, episodic, philosophical. It wouldn’t be out of place shelved next to After Me Comes the Flood in the ‘weird and fractured’ section of the library. It begins with that first iconic line - “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” – and from there on in crackles with creative energy.

Roland Deschain is the last gunslinger, a son of lost Gilead, on a mission to confront the man in black and reach the Dark Tower. His quest is of epic and biblical proportion, stretching deep into his past, and bound up with magical forces that the reader can’t yet begin to understand from the text in front of them. We get snippets of Roland’s childhood and of his more recent past, told in flashback to people he meets on his journey, as well as clues as to the nature of his world. It seems like it might be a far future America, parched by drought and politically unstable. The occasional glimpse of our contemporary world is confirmed by the appearance of Jake, a young boy from New York who finds himself in the middle of Roland’s path. The man in black has stolen him from his own place and time – a boy on his way to school, walking down a busy street – and thrust him into a cosmic conflict, forcing Roland to chose between his growing affection for Jake and his obsession with the Tower.

The Gunslinger was both a satisfying and dissatisfying experience. On the one hand it’s obtuse, portentous and frustrating as hell – what on earth is happening?! – but on the other it’s intriguing and poetic, and the dialogue is classic King. I think if I was reading it without knowing about all the books to come I would be utterly baffled; with the next three sitting on my shelves I can reconcile myself to the mystery for now.